The Justice Department sent letters to county election officials across California on Friday demanding they help identify suspected noncitizen voters within 48 hours or risk legal consequences, escalating a fight over voter rolls that's been building for weeks.

Letters went out to 57 of California's 58 counties, though the scale of actual responses is unclear: at least 18 counties say they received one, and officials in four have confirmed it directly to reporters, according to CBS News.

What the Letters Demand

Counties have 48 hours to commit to working with the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to verify citizenship status for people on a federal list. For anyone whose status can't be confirmed, the letters ask officials to segregate — not cancel — those voters' mail ballots until their eligibility is resolved, per ABC7 Los Angeles.

LIKELY ALIENS

That's the language used in at least one letter, sent to San Bernardino County, which cited a list of 1,133 names, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bilal Essayli's office warned that continuing to send mail ballots to, or tabulate votes from, people on the list before citizenship is verified could carry legal consequences for county officials, according to the Chronicle's reporting.

Part of a Bigger Push

Friday's letters follow an earlier escalation: a Tuesday letter from DOJ official Trent McCotter to Los Angeles County's registrar, accompanied by a thumb drive naming "likely noncitizens" who'd been sent ballots, tied to a federal lawsuit seeking to block the county and the California Secretary of State from counting votes from more than 20,000 people the government alleges are likely noncitizen voters.

Voting-rights advocates note that confirmed illegal voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare and has never been shown to swing an election outcome — and that the Justice Department's broader voter-roll litigation campaign has lost the large majority of similar cases it has brought elsewhere. California election officials have not yet said how, or whether, they will comply with the 48-hour demand.